Financial institutions, such as banks, credit unions, savings and loan associations, building societies, asset management firms, investment companies, trust companies, etc., often provide statements to their customers indicating the financial transactions that have taken place over a certain period of time, e.g., one month or a quarter of a year. The customers can use these statements to make sure the transactions reported on the statements match with the customer's own records of the transactions. In this way, the statements can aid the customer in balancing the customer's accounts. As an example, a treasury manager of an organization may be responsible for the task of balancing various accounts to ensure that financial transactions have been entered correctly based on the reporting of the financial institution and records kept at the organization itself.
In the past, financial institutions provided statements exclusively in paper form. In this respect, balancing the accounts involved manual processes that were both time consuming and tedious. However, in recent years, financial institutions have been able to provide statements electronically in order to reduce paper usage. With these electronic statements, some processes have been developed to allow a user to balance accounts electronically. Nevertheless, further improvements regarding reconciliation systems and methods are still needed.